Monday, August 26, 2013

The dominant religion of those living centuries from now
will likely be pantheistic, because pantheism best reconciles atheism and
theism and thus also our rational and irrational sides. But pantheism is
actually an ancient form of religion, as exemplified by Daoism, a religion that
seems understood best in relation to Confucianism. Confucius was a humanist who
believed that peace can be obtained by cultivating our personal qualities.
Confucianism is thus similar to ancient Greek virtue theory. But instead of
“virtue,” the supreme value for Confucius is ren, a kind of love and respect for human nature. How is ren cultivated? By modifying our
behaviour according to rules that allow us to express our desires within moral
limits.

By contrast, Daoism is meta-ethical. Instead of engaging in
debates about which social conventions best express our nature, Daoists say we
should appreciate that human beings are part of much larger systems, subject to
their own rhythms. There are the vast cycles of the cosmos, as explained by
scientists, as well as the ineffable way of the whole of being. According to
the Daoist meta-ethical perspective, the problem with Confucian humanism is
that by focusing on the individual and on society, this humanism separates us
from the rest of nature. Our moral rules may have the laudable purpose of
helping us find peace, but Confucius offers a council of despair, the ego’s
desperate strategy of dealing only with the symptoms of inner and social
discord. The root of the problems of suffering and of evil is the dualism that walls
us off from nature. When we lose sight of the larger dao, or ways, we live out of alignment with the wholes of which
we’re parts. For example, we have excess desires which can’t be fulfilled,
because they’re born of myopia. Daoism’s overall solution is wu wei, the paradoxical action without
intention, a sort of simple, spontaneous, and natural going with the flow of
things. Forrest Gump and the Dude from The Big Lebowski exemplify this sort of
unexpected sage who lives in harmony with the world largely because he doesn’t
overthink or become preoccupied with the arbitrary rules of social games.

Pantheism and Aesthetics

My main interests in Daoism are twofold. First, there’s the
question of pantheism that arises from the unification of human and natural ways. Second, there’s the issue of wu wei. Beginning with pantheism, then, Daoist
monism collapses the distinction between artificial rules and natural
regularities, and thus both naturalizes us and humanizes the world. The big
question is this: What are natural regularities, the nomic relations or
patterns that are the facts of which natural laws speak? By calling these
regularities ways, the Daoist
compares, say, a star’s orbit to the path you might take while walking through
a forest. But can something be a path if it has no destination? Suppose you
start walking along a sidewalk, but the sidewalk goes on forever. Are you still
on a path? Is this infinite “route” to nowhere a way at all? As we first come
to understand them, paths and ways are teleological because they’re our
artifacts. We bushwhack through the forest and lay down pavement to produce
unmistakable pathways. So even when there’s only natural order there’s the
appearance of intelligent design which invites us to engage in anthropocentric
projection. Thus, it’s because there are cycles in nature, finite and
contingent patterns with beginnings, middles, and ends, that we can compare
natural regularities generally to ways or paths down which things journey. And
where there’s the appearance of intelligent design, there’s the extended
anthropocentric metaphor: not only are there ways throughout the universe, but there are natural functions,
systems or mechanisms that can go right or wrong, in or out of harmony with
each other. In this way, we can compare any natural system to an artifact that
works according to a purpose.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

I’ve started to use Twitter to try to convert the ideas on this
blog into haiku form and I’ll try to add at least one haiku per day. I’ve added
the Twitter feed to the top right of this blog. Feel free to tweet me your own haiku, blog topics you'd like to see me cover, or other RWUG-related comments. Your tweets should
show up on the feed, although I think it takes a minute or so for them to
appear.

Also, I've added a Contact form just below the About section on the right, in case you'd like to send me a message.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

In the Age of Reason, we usually think objectivity is better
than subjectivity. When we speak subjectively, we say more about ourselves than
about anything else, telling how something makes us feel or revealing
unintentionally how our bias filters our perception. Either way, subjective
thinking seems self-indulgent, since we assume that few people are interested
in our emotional states, that we should save our personal confessions for those
who are part of our private life. By contrast, we think objectivity is a noble,
eminently practical and even selfless discipline. Critical thinkers,
mathematicians, and scientists are the knights of rationality, circumventing
their personal preferences to understand the real world, the one that doesn’t
depend on how we feel about it.

Take, for example, our taste in politics, art, or food. In
these cultural areas, there are no objectively correct answers. George Lakoff,
Jonathan Haidt and others have shown that liberals and conservatives have
different gut reactions to moral questions. Different kinds of people prefer
different things, depending on environmental pressures and people’s past
experience which affects the development of their neural circuits. So when
someone who prefers Thai food speaks about it, she’s expressing herself rather
than talking just about the independent reality of Pad Thai. In fact, when we
think objectively, we usually think the real world is value-neutral, that how
things seem to us, as interpreted and filtered by our memories and moods, is an
illusion. Fundamentally, the world is very different from how it seems to us
when we’re mentally processing it, because we project meaning, purpose, and
value onto everything—unless we’re attempting to be objective. We anthropomorphize
impersonal regularities and even random fluctuations like the shapes of clouds,
because we normally prefer to be social even when there’s no one else in sight.

How, though, do we learn the objective facts? We might think
that objectivity is a matter of quieting the internal noise we generate, to let
the real world speak for itself, as it were, as though logic and science were
comparable to Buddhist meditation. But this isn’t how objectivity works.
Were you to silence your inner narrative, to ignore your intuitions and dispositions,
and then to look around at the world, you wouldn’t suddenly behold the
mind-independent facts. On the contrary, your brain would subconsciously
process information carried in light rays and in the vibration of air molecules,
for example, producing the apparent world you perceive. The brain automatically
transduces ambient signals into neural patterns that stand in as mental
representations of the world. These representations are so interconnected that
we move easily from one thought to an associated one, and are able to overlay
our value-laden mental map onto the real world, which is why quieting the mind
is such a challenge. Moreover, without our concepts for classifying things, we
wouldn’t understand our sensations.

This was the main point of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of
knowledge. We don’t deal directly with mind-independent reality, because wherever
we go we carry with us ourselves and thus our filters, habits, methods, and so
forth. Even objectivity is a kind of knowledge and knowledge doesn’t just fall
out of the sky, but lies at the end of a mental process. There would still be a
world were there no living things, but that world would differ even from
how it’s objectively represented. The world doesn’t speak for itself, after all;
instead, it speaks through us, regardless of whether we’re being subjective or objective.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

The following is an email exchange between Scott Bakker and
me that took place in response to my article Mechanists and Transcendentalists. I think this dialogue sheds
much light on our agreements and disagreements about the impact of the
scientific picture of human nature on our intuitive self-image. The dialogue’s
quite long, but it becomes more and more focused about a third of the way in,
and by the half-way point I think we each come to insights about each other’s
views and how they interrelate. Note that Scott summarizes his take on the discussion here.

*****

SCOTT BAKKER: Hey
Ben. I finally had a chance to read this piece. I like the
writing, but I think you mischaracterize my position in some
pretty obvious ways--glaring even. Characterizing BBT as transcendental is
well and fine, but then you need at the very least to consider its
diagnosis of transcendentalism as a kind of cognitive illusion. The bit about
the self-refuting nature of scientism really doesn't engage the position at
all: nowhere do I argue that cognition is an all or nothing affair, only that
where competing theoretical claims are concerned, TI [theoretical
incompetence] requires we defer to science, no matter how painful that might
be. Now if you had an argument against TI, that would be something, but you
don't (and how could you, short of turning all of cognitive psychology on its
ear convincingly?). The fact that I'm trapped talking out of my ass as much as
you or anyone else I'm perfectly okay with. I'm a skeptical naturalist
after all! This means saying that BBT is a speculative theory isn't
saying anything really, and it makes the equivocation of
'speculation' with 'philosophy,' well, hinky. BBT is no more or less
speculative than any other unconfirmed scientific theory. And like any
scientific theory, it can be read as 'presupposing' x, y, and z--what have you.
The real question is, So what? Hume's problem of induction, for
instance, is no more a problem for BBT than it is for Darwinian
Evolution. More specifically, so long as the question of metacognitive
accuracy is one that can be answered empirically, I'm not sure how you're doing
anything more than stomping your foot by declaring it
'philosophical.' It seems to me that Darwinian Evolution is even more
'philosophical' than BBT by your lights, given that there is a good deal that
it supposes that cannot be empirically resolved one way or another. By the same
token, it explains a myriad of phenomena that are absolutely mysterious
otherwise--like BBT.

Saying that BBT remains speculative is simply saying it
awaits scientific arbitration. Given this, why should BBT's consilience
with TI do anything other than count in its favour? As I say over and over,
with BBT at least things will get empirically sorted. Your argument only
makes sense if you think TI rules out all speculation as absolutely errant
or that BBT lies beyond the pale of empirical arbitration. The first
simply misrepresents my views. The latter requires some kind of substantial
argument, which you do not give.

Monday, August 12, 2013

After the secularization of modern societies, Westerners
increasingly lost confidence in their traditional religious institutions, but they
still wanted answers to their existential questions. They became seekers and
sought answers in both ancient and Eastern traditions, deemed heretical or
blasphemous by the Church, and in modern science. So began the New Age movement
over the last couple of centuries, in which modernists combined mystical or
esoteric teachings with contemporary scientific formulations so that they could
be unashamed of their spirituality.

Here’s the basic New Age cosmology, as far as I can tell. God
or Source energy is the fundamental reality. God created a world in she could
lose herself in projections, in beings who are misled into believing that
they’re merely material, alienated individuals. Matter isn’t a domain of
impersonal spatial and temporal dimensions but is a machine that serves God’s
purpose of teaching her projections about their true, divine identity. That is,
God wants to know herself, but to do this, she has to fragment and delude
herself to test whether she can regain her self-awareness. One such delusion
amounts to philosophical naturalism, the worldview in which mindless matter is
fundamental, we’re merely individual animals that evolved accidentally, and
there is no God or perfect self that unites all things and guarantees a happy
outcome for us.

The truth, according to New Thought proponents, is that
material things are projections of our thoughts, so that we create our reality
by means of the law of vibrations or attraction. Depending on our
vibratory frequency, we attract certain experiences that match us and repel
those that don’t. We can co-create experiences if we have similar vibrations,
but each person as a projection of Source energy literally lives in his or her
own world. As Teal Scott says, physical reality is a mirror hologram
that reflects our thoughts. Instead of a multiverse based on quantum
fluctuations, we have an ideational multiverse based on the frequencies that
distinguish us as unenlightened individuals, or individuals who don’t yet fully
identify with God. For example, as Scott says in the last cited video,
when a murder happens, both the murderer and the murdered person create the act
in that they’re vibratory matches to it. Or to take another example, when we
worry, we ironically bring about the dreaded event, because we focus our mind
on it and thus attract that which matches our vibration.

This worldview is an eclectic mix of mystical ideas from
Hinduism and of scientific concepts, like the concepts of a natural law and of a
quantum mechanical vibration. Curiously, gurus like these two
women display absolute confidence that their worldview is correct and they seem
to pity naturalists and traditional theists for not waking up to the truth. A
new atheist would respond by going line by line through their metaphysical
doctrines and showing that they’re illogical and contradicted by science. But this
would be a mug’s game. New Age is a religious movement and New Thought is a
collection of myths, not arguments or scientific theories. To the extent that
speakers like Teal Scott maintain that their worldview is factual, empirical,
and logical, they too are mistaken and are bound to be disappointed. As a
challenger to naturalism on philosophical or scientific grounds, New Thought is
glaringly inadequate. For starters, New Thought is unfalsifiable; New Age gurus
have an answer for everything because they’re free to reinterpret their
teachings at will or to add or subtract from them, and their terminology is
metaphorical rather than quantified. For example, Sudevi was influenced by a
Hindu sect which critics called a cult, but then she came under the influence
of a Catholic priest and so she added some Christian theology about Christ
consciousness to her New Age synthesis. Is Christianity consistent with
Hinduism? Of course--when you’re free to ignore parts of the religions. And were
Teal Scott to take her talk of vibrations to an actual quantum physicist, the
physicist would toast her over an open fire, as it were; the pwnage would be epic.
But were the physicist to think that refuting New Thought on those grounds is
scientifically useful, she would have badly missed the point.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Scott Bakker’s article, Necessary Magic, is a trenchant rejoinder to my article, Scientism and the Artistic Side of Knowledge, (SASK). In the following response, I’ll try to clarify some of the relevant issues in our
discussion and then I’ll address the central points of disagreement. As
indicated by this article’s title, I think that, a scientistic interpretation
of cognitive science notwithstanding, BBT’s mechanistic self-image is
consistent with a transcendental interpretation of how we appear to ourselves
through introspection. We are not factually
what our intuitions say we are, but that matters most to those who assume a
scientistic conception of knowledge. If we act as good mechanists and ask what
the intuitive self-image is efficient at doing, we should be led to agree with
Scott when he says that that self-image is a lie. So we’re good at lying to
ourselves and indeed we’re naturally built to do just that, perhaps because we
can’t stomach the natural facts. We retreat to the matrix of illusions, as it
were, and because scientists are bent on discovering the underlying facts, we
could use a strategy for heroically dealing with both perspectives, since both
seem inevitable for machines like us. That’s where aesthetic, ethical, and
existential standards can come into play, and so I think Scott’s project and
the philosophy I call existential cosmicism are largely harmonious.

Scientism and Transcendentalism

Now, then, to the preliminaries. SASK was motivated by the debate between Scott and Terence Blake. Blake contrasted scientism with pluralism,
and I was interested in how far the scientistic line can be pushed, so that’s
why I wrote about scientism in the context of BBT. But is BBT scientistic or
not? “Scientism” has a nonpejorative core meaning, but also pejorative
connotations. According to the core definition, scientism is the belief that
the sciences are the only disciplines that supply us with knowledge. Scott says
that “humans are theoretically incompetent, and that science is the one
institutional prosthetic that clearly affords them some competence.”
This seems scientistic in the core sense, although he also says that true
claims can “drift about” in nonscientific philosophy. So if “scientism” is
tweaked to mean that science is the only reliable
source of knowledge, Scott’s view is scientistic, for whatever that
nonpejorative characterization is worth.

The reason the word is usually read as pejorative, though,
is that philosophers have reached some consensus that scientism refutes itself.
After all, scientism is a philosophical rather than a scientific proposition.
Just ask yourself, then, whether the claim that science is the only reliable
source of knowledge is itself reliable. If not, we needn’t trust that all
knowledge comes from the sciences, and if so, we have the paradox of knowledge
that comes reliably from a nonscientific discipline (philosophy). Either way,
scientism is unstable. So is BBT scientistic in this pejorative sense? This
raises the issue of presuppositions which is perhaps my main point of
disagreement with BBT.

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About the Author

In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.